Flat per seat, per month

USD 1,000 per productive seat per calendar month. There is no per-contact, per-chat or per-ticket component, and no separate charge for the overnight bands.

Term	Basis
Base rate	USD 1,000 per productive seat per calendar month. Flat. No per-contact, per-chat or per-ticket component, and no premium for the overnight bands.
What a seat means	A seat is a continuously staffed position, not a person. A 24/7 seat requires approximately 4.9 people to sustain — see coverage arithmetic.
Seat band	Minimum 12 seats. Maximum 60 without a fresh capacity review. Wave plan agreed at contracting.
Billing basis	Calendar month. Part months and mid-month additions pro-rated on seat-days.
Vacant seats	A seat vacated by attrition is billed for up to 3 business days while backfill is arranged. Beyond 5 business days it is not billed until refilled.
Ramp and training	Training and certification before release to live contacts are never billable. Billing starts on the agent's first live conversation.
Coverage credits	One seat-day per uncovered hour, capped at 5% of the monthly invoice. Client-side platform outage and evidenced force majeure are excluded.
Downtime	Client-side platform outage is billable up to 8 hours per month on evidence. Provider-side power, connectivity or transport failure is not billable and does not excuse coverage.
Volume	Contact volume is not contracted in either direction. A quiet month is not a shortfall; a spike is managed through the roster and, if sustained, through a capacity review.
Invoicing	Service provider invoices Akontec by the 3rd working day of the following month with the seat register, the coverage report and the quality summary attached.
Payment terms	To be completed at contracting — days from receipt of a correct invoice.
Currency	Invoiced in USD, remitted in INR at the reference rate on the invoice date. Bank charges borne by the party incurring them.
Taxes	Exclusive of GST and of any withholding. Each party bears its own statutory obligations.
Term and notice	Initial term 12 months, auto-renewing. 60 days' written notice on staffed seats.
Data protection	Customer personal data is processed only inside the client's platform and the agreed boundary. No export, no local copies, no personal devices on the floor.
Exclusivity	The service provider will not take a directly competing support engagement onto the same bay or with the same certified agents during the term.
Insurance	Professional indemnity and cyber liability cover appropriate to the seat count, maintained throughout the term and evidenced annually.

Why flat, and why no night premium. A per-contact rate would make the quiet overnight bands look unprofitable and create pressure to thin exactly the hours that matter most. A flat seat rate prices the coverage obligation as a whole, which is how the client buys it and how you should staff it.

Evidence

What the invoice pack must contain

An invoice arriving without these attachments is not a correct invoice and the payment clock does not start.

Attachment	Prepared by	Content
Seat register	Provider billing owner	Every seat, role, queue certification, deployment date, exit date, seat-days claimed
Coverage report	Workforce-management analyst	Minimum staffing versus actual presence for every hour of the month, from platform data, with any uncovered hours itemised
Quality summary	Provider quality analyst	Composite score and its five components, audit sample sizes, calibration variance against Akontec
SLA summary	Provider MIS	Every service-levelled measure against its standard, with the month's misses explained
Backfill record	Provider delivery manager	Every vacancy in the month, the date it arose, the date it was filled

Disputes

An invoice line is disputed in writing within seven working days of receipt, with the specific seat-days or coverage hours identified. Undisputed lines are paid on the agreed terms regardless. A coverage credit is calculated from the platform's presence data, so most disputes on this process concern whether an outage was client-side — which is why outages should be logged with a reference at the time, not reconstructed at month end.

Next step

Coverage is the only measure with a credit attached.

Everything else is managed through the quality framework and the escalation ladder.

See the provider economics Read the coverage arithmetic